Read Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice Online

Authors: Erica Jong

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #Time Travel

Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (6 page)

BOOK: Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice
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But no. He looks at me with those deep and burning eyes and says again, “You are the wonder of this place. Do not leave this night unless you leave with me.”

He touches my hand. For a moment, I am stirred. I could easily (so deep is the power even of suggested love) go to my suite with him, make love, and even be moved by it. Surely I have done it often enough in the past—though whether I was in love with sex, with the man, or with my own witchy power is not clear.

But I resist. And the battle is not a difficult one—no Lepanto this, no Waterloo, just a simple decision not to succumb. As I invoked this poet, so can I also banish him. Besides, he is speaking in a foreign tongue, his words of love half translated from another language.

“Your eyes,” he says again. “You have the most extraordinary eyes.” He is still burning, not yet realizing that I have turned the fire off as simply as one turns off the jets in one of those L. A. fireplaces. I run my finger along the hairy back of his hand, stand up, clasp my bag, and say, “I must go and change now. Thank you for all your kind words.” It is how I would close the response to a fan letter.

“May I escort you to your room?”

Persistent bugger, isn't he? Well, men go through the world led by their cocks, plunging here, plunging there, while women are finally mothers or else deniers of maternity. Hundreds of years of feminism and that's where we still are. It's all so simple and human. Both sexes have their griefs, their pains—equally as sharp. I pity them both.

“No, I must go alone,” I say.

And so I must, even though traversing the lobby will be, as usual, a trial.

I walk briskly to the elevator, looking down, avoiding the eyes upon me—including Wolfgang's long, lingering stare, which burns holes in my back.

Up in my suite again, I find my ball gown carefully hung in the armoire, the paillettes and pearls all carefully restored. And turning around, I suddenly see another gigantic bunch of white roses, to replace the rather wilting ones of five days past.

Again there is the parchment envelope, with J
ESSICA
on the outside, and within, again in beautiful calligraphy, another sonnet.

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu.

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose.

But, like a sad slave, stay and think of naught

Save, where you are, how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will,

Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

I read the sonnet and it gives me chills.

3
White Rose, Red Cross

T
HE WHOLE PALAZZO DEL CINEMA
is ablaze with lights the night of the Red Cross Gala. And the ladies are arriving, dressed in their Krizias and Valentinos, their St. Laurents and Givenchys. The men—well-brought-up aristocrats (or pseudoaristocrats) that they are—all know how to kiss a lady's hand by bringing the fingers not quite to their lips and kissing the air that eddies above the flesh. As they do this, they bring their heels together in a sort of Prussian salute. It is all terribly decadent and nineteenth century—a little
Anna Karenina
in the midst of the punk Lido of the eighties, where teenagers with spiky orange hair, or shaven heads sporting one long, black braid, roar around on immense, phallic motorcycles.

I am wearing my black Zandra Rhodes Victorian fantasy (and underneath it, a red-trimmed black Merry Widow that dangles red satin garters). I am staggering about on four-inch heels from Susan Bennis/Warren Edwards, having forsaken my comfortable Maud Frizons for this occasion. That the black Merry Widow makes me look like the heroine of a de Sade novel is known only to me—nonetheless, it gives me special secret pleasure as I cling to Grigory's arm, entering the Palazzo del Cinema, and the photographers' flash attack begins.

Grigory is wearing a very un-Soviet Savile Row tux, with red silk bow tie and red silk cummerbund (“in honor of the Party, Comrade Jessichka”). He strokes my cheek, cuddles my bare shoulder, squeezes my hand—all for the benefit of the press. I am starting to feel a little miffed by these constant displays of bogus passion, but also curiously resigned. The press will pair me with
someone—
so why not Grigory, who, after all, is photogenic and makes good copy? I feel as if my pseudobiography is being created even as I live my actual life. Who would believe that I sleep with Shakespeare? Who would believe that on my bedside table is a tall bottle of San Pellegrino and on my pillow the same volumes of sonnets, comedies, tragedies I went to bed with as a book-mad adolescent girl?

Grigory and I are seated in the special section reserved for the jury. We are in the second row, right behind Walter Wildhonig
und Frau
, Benjamin Gabriel Gimpel and wife, and Leonardo da Leone and
fidanzata
. The other members of the jury are ranged around us. Sitting right in front of us is an ancient woman whom I do not recognize. She continually fondles a silver-headed cane, and from time to time she turns to stare at me intensely as if she were about to speak. I notice that her right eye is much larger than her left and both her eyes glitter like dark crystals. A musty odor of mothballs and garlic issues from her clothes. The sight of her makes me uneasy—as if she were spying on me.

The air is stiflingly hot. I feel the stays of my corset pressing into my flesh, almost as if I were an Elizabethan lady. My books on Shakespeare have made me particularly aware of feminine costume and its effect on women's lives. Just as I have gazed at the famous Chandos portrait of W.S. and felt that I knew and loved the man behind those luminous brown eyes, those eyes of genius and lust, of tenderness and resignation to the cruelties and follies of the world, so too have I gazed at portraits of his queen and marveled at her attire. To be a woman of will and determination, seduction and guile, in an age that demanded tightly laced corsets, immense ruffs that rose to the back of the neck in great gauze wings, and, under all, a wheel farthingale—which made one's very skirt into a kind of pup tent to be maneuvered through doors, into coaches, onto litters—why, what discipline this
alone
required! Nor did Elizabeth shrink from it. Tough as any man, tender as any woman, she was fast becoming my heroine. The more I read of Elizabethan England, the more I submerged the present into Shakespeare's past, the more I realized that all the last four hundred years had been a falling away from the feminism that Elizabeth herself embodied. Not for her the confusion between dressing like a man and thinking like a monarch. She
was
a monarch, but she was also a woman. And what was her strength, above all? Never marrying. Never tying her fortunes to one man. In this particular alone, she outshone (and outlasted) her cousin Mary who lost her head, and lost her head—the classic plight of woman.

It is the custom of the film festival to introduce the director and the principal actors for each film before the film is shown, but the actors have long since arrived and still Björn is not here. They wait expectantly, empty seats in their midst. There is the lovely sweet young thing who plays Donna Anna (and Constanze Mozart), the young actor who plays Don Giovanni (and Mozart), the handsome middle-aged actor who plays the Commendatore (and Leopold Mozart), and last but not least the homely middle-aged actor who plays Leporello (and Salieri).

Grigory and I have arrived late, at the very tail end of the introductions and speeches concerning the Red Cross Gala, the funds raised and by whom, the fulsome congratulatory speeches to rich matrons before whom
Le Tout Venise
grovels. This is the main difference between dogs and men (as Mark Twain might have said): dogs will not grovel before money. One lady, a certain Contessa Venier, is the chairperson of the gala. Immensely fat, with a jaundiced tinge to her freckled, oozing flesh, she is helped to the lectern by two toadies in tuxes. She herself is stuffed into an unbecoming pear-shaped sack of shocking pink chiffon, festooned with iridescent pink sequins; sinking pink satin boats support her swollen feet. She staggers to the lectern, lifts to her dim eyes a bejeweled hand bearing a bejeweled lorgnette, and reads a list of acknowledgments and thanks. This goes on for a while, delaying the commencement of the film, but still Björn and Lilli do not arrive. It's clear that the actors are extremely anxious awaiting their director. Contessa Venier drones on.

“She was a cabaret singer in Tunis,” Grigory says in a stage whisper, “when Count Venier found her. At that time,
he
was married to the first Contessa Venier, whom some say she poisoned. A true story of capitalist decadence—eh, Jessichka?…”

I shoot Grigory a look that says: You Soviets have decadence, too—but he is so self-satisfied that he doesn't get it. All at once, the whole room seems to turn around: Björn and Lilli are entering from the rear of the mezzanine. The actors buzz among themselves. The jury turns to stare, and there is Björn, pale, blue-gray-eyed, balding Björn in an inky tux and white silk turtleneck, a long, white silk aviator scarf thrown about his neck. Sailing into the room at his side, in battleship gray moiré, is Lilli, her silver hair ballooning about her ears like a Gibson girl's, her eyes blazing green to her husband's misty blue ones—and dark with determination.

Lilli helps a rather distrait Björn down the steps of the center aisle of the mezzanine and into the section where the actors sit. The Perssons take their places while the Contessa Venier drones on, unaware of their arrival. Soon another toady in a tux is dispatched onto the stage to inform her that Björn has arrived. She looks up, sees him in the mezzanine, and begins winding up her fulsome acknowledgments. When she finally shuffles offstage, using the flunkies as crutches, the lights dim and the president of the Biennale, his face blanched moon-white by a single spotlight, comes out to introduce Björn and the leading actors in the film.


Si presenta in sala il maestro Björn Persson
,” says
il direttore.
And the applause is deafening. The whole orchestra section stands, almost in unison, and turns toward the mezzanine to applaud Björn, who merely nods his head and waves his hand diffidently, then indicates his actors. It is Lilli who seems to acknowledge the applause most regally, Lilli the maestro's wife, a part she was evidently born for.


Salute al maestro
,”
il direttore
says again. And again and again comes the deafening applause. Oh, I know the Italian habit of promoting
signore
to
dottore, dottore
to
professore
(even hotel directors here are called
professori
if they have been in the profession long enough and are loved and feared), but never have I heard the word
maestro
uttered with such surpassing respect.

Even when the applause abates a little and the actors are introduced, the tumult in the room is still so great that we can hardly hear their names. The maestro is here; the maestro is triumphant.

Presently, the houselights dim and Mozart's overture to
Don Giovanni
thunders forth, full of pathos, full of the terror and wonder of lust. This marriage of the cold north and warm south, this hybrid of Teutonic discipline and Latin
dolce far niente—
Mozart's music perhaps even more than Byron's poetry, or Browning's—embodies the vitality that results when north falls passionately in love and mates with south. And where more perfectly are these elements meshed than in
Don Giovanni
, the story of a cruel, perfidious, empty lover softened only by the prayerful playfulness of Mozart's music? Mozart, like Shakespeare, has the ability to make even his villains human, softening their edges with song.

A small, provincial opera company in Germany is rehearsing
Don Giovanni
. The director of the company is in love with the soprano, but so is his son, a charming, roguish ne'er-do-well, who is the rehearsal pianist for the company. The son is a bit mad, and in his madness imagines himself to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father to be Leopold Mozart. As the opera is rehearsed he falls more and more into a fantasy of himself as Mozart, wooing the soprano with music he claims to have composed especially for her. All his inadequacies as a man, an artist, a lover, are assuaged by his passionate identification with Mozart.

We cut back and forth between the rehearsals for the opera and the offstage life that goes on among this curious love triangle. This part of the film is in black and white: the rehearsals, the backstage maneuvering, the introduction to the story. Then suddenly it is the opening night of
Don Giovanni
and the film bursts out in full color. The curtain rises and the opera begins with its thundering chords. We see the members of the orchestra fiddling, blowing, pounding their drums. We see the conductor's face, a mirror of the complex beauty held captive within the music. The incomparable overture blends into the opening scene, and suddenly we are with Leporello as he paces before Donna Anna's house.

The opera reduces us; the opera masters us; and we are off into its world, now identifying with Leporello as he bemoans his fate, now watching Donna Anna pursue Don Giovanni, now caught in the mortal struggle between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni, now feeling Don Giovanni's impenitence as he boasts of having raped the daughter and murdered the father.

We settle into the opera with a sense of perfect familiarity, knowing the moves to come, knowing that each of our own feelings will be uncannily embodied in a main character. In Don Giovanni, impenitent evil; in Leporello, doubt and cynicism toward a master coupled with grudging admiration; in Donna Anna, grief and outraged innocence; in Donna Elvira, bitterness and rage. We are borne along on this current of familiar feeling and on the complementary current of Mozart's music. The whole theater seems to relax. The audience is in the familiar, the traditional, a crisis whose outcome is totally known.

BOOK: Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice
8.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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